Procedural World is the blog of the Voxel Farm developers, covering voxel engines, procedural generation, and the tech used in Everquest Next.
HN commenters recommend it for technical write-ups on voxel engines and procedural worlds, citing it alongside Atomontage and No Man's Sky discussions.
You may want to check out Everquest Next. I think it would be fair to say that EQN is very close to a completely voxelized environment and at least mostly procedural. There is a great deal of curated content as well, but it seems like they are working on sourcing lots of that from players. The voxelized environment in EQN is based on Miguel Cepero's work. I believe they in fact hired him. I have been reading his blog for a long time and you can get a pretty good idea of the techniques that are being used.
http://procworld.blogspot.com/
A couple of quick hints to get you going in the right direction is that there are ( I believe ) a couple of generalized tricks involved to pull this off well. The first is using the 'correct' method to tesselate your voxel geometry. Minecraft literally uses cubes and you are familiar with the result. Another 'classic' method is the application of marching cubes/tetrahedra. This gives you fairly good organic-ish shapes but suffers from the inability to render sharp edges. Everything looks blobby. I believe the method used by EQN makes use dual-contouring, or a variant, which allows you to create organic shapes and also preserve sharp edges. A second factor is the ability to use different levels of resolution or scale for your voxels situationally. This allows you to craft human-scale things like cups and swords and whatnot, with human-scale details, and still craft houses and mountains and trees, without the need for storing…
If you like procedural generation check out [0]. His recent blog posts have been about his Minecraft-like voxel engine (currently being used for Everquest Landmark I believe) but he has a lot of great gems in his archives.
Two recent articles about his language to randomly generate architecture, and two older ones about city generation:
http://procworld.blogspot.com/2014/11/cantor-city.html
http://procworld.blogspot.com/2014/11/life-without-debugger.html
http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/screenshots-of-building-scopes.html - Builds a city over rocky terrain.
http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/city-lots.html
The video in the second one is really cool from a programming and debugging perspective.
[0] http://procworld.blogspot.com
ed: Added more city-generation links.
Let's see. Often when I find something interesting on HN or Reddit I might see if the author writes other interesting posts and subscribe to their blog on Feedly. I currently have a few hundred sources that I subscribe to so it might be a bit hard for me to choose which "blogs" I'd promote. But there are some:
- https://blog.codinghorror.com/
- http://www.pentadact.com/
- http://procworld.blogspot.no/
- https://moviecode.tumblr.com/
- http://hackaday.com/
- https://research.googleblog.com/
- https://gpuofthebrain.com/
- https://xkcd.com/
- http://oglaf.com/
This is an almost random selection of some of the blogs that I subscribe to.
What you say is very true. Maybe I should have said "intermediate" tutorials. Even though the problem area is so deep and complex there have been astonishing engines produced by very small teams, such as:
* http://procworld.blogspot.com/ which is a voxel-based rendering engine mostly developed by one person
* http://the-witness.net/ which is a game with a custom engine developed by a small team and features many realistic effects
Every once in a while, I've been reading the articles in this interesting blog[1] that covers various topics on procedural world generation. I've found that some of the articles (like, for example, this one[2] covering the creation of vegetation using space colonization instead of L-systems) are very educating.
[1] http://procworld.blogspot.com/
[2] http://procworld.blogspot.com/2011/02/space-colonization.html
I don't know what tech No Man's Sky is using, but Voxel Farm[0] does something very similar (it's being used in Everquest Next and StarForge among other things). However, instead of marching cubes it uses dual contouring which produces nicer results. Also, it was made by one guy. His blog is amazing: http://procworld.blogspot.com/
[0]http://voxelfarm.com/vfweb/index.html